Advice for Graduate Students

Tyler Cowen does it again. How does he manage to put down in three simple bulleted points everything a person needs to get through a PhD program in economics? I'm positive this is general wisdom, and not just specific to economics. Heck, it's probably general to everything, and not just academics. But boy is it ever true for economics.

My advice here is simple:

1. To potential academic employers you are defined by your job market paper, your letters of recommendation, and by your publications, if you have any. Your formal "fields" aren't that important, nor are your classes per se.

2. Pick classes to learn skills and choose your classes on the quality of the professor, not on the topic per se. A quick classroom visit often reveals this quality within thirty seconds.

3. Pick a mentor that you, on a personal basis, relate to very well. This is of extreme importance. If he or she doesn't like you, all is lost.

I can safely say that I did #1 and #3 perfectly. That is, for #1, I had a very good job market paper (though now I think it's crap, but whatever - at the time I was stupider, so didn't know it was as unconvincing as I now think it is), and excellent letters of recommendation. I didn't have any publications, though. And my fields were all over the place: the field sequence I actually took was Econometrics, Public Finance and Industrial Organization, wherein I tested for Econometrics (failed the first time, passed the second). On my actual CV, though, I put my fields as Labor, Health, Applied Micro, and Law and Economics! Never took a health course, and only took one labor field course. But man did I ever learn from that labor course. Everything I am and do is bound up in that one course, and I learned zero (I wish I was lying) from the other three field courses I took.

For #3, I knew I had found the right mentor when one day we spent 3 hours in his office talking about Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, and arguing over whether 1939 was a better year for movies than 1999 (I said 1999, but he likes Casablanca more than The Matrix or Office Space. He can be forgiven for that, I finally decided). Ultimately, I got got excellent letters too because of #3. I knew far too many people who chose people as chairs who were the so-called experts in their fields, only to get terrorized or destroyed during the dissertation process. The sheer number of students who were ABD at year six only to quit (!) and walk away boggles the mind, but in most cases, it's because #3 was not followed.

My regret from graduate school was that I didn't follow #2 at all. I wanted to, strangely enough, but was actively discouraged from doing so by other students or faculty. I came from a humanities background, and as a literature major, it was the understanding that #2 guided how you progressed through the program. It didn't matter if in the end it didn't make anything remotely resembling a coherent, linear story because you took medieval literature and the class on Spanish lesbian writers. You knew that the medievalist was an inspiration and the Spanish lesbian class was going to change your life forever. So we had this guy who was a monetary economist, and I actually came here to study with him, even though I abhorred the very notion of doing something in money. I hated macroeconomics, for instance, and was a worshipper of Gary Becker who made it a point not to study things that typical economists studied - like money! So I didn't. Instead I took IO which was a waste of a year of my life, and public finance, in which I didn't learn a damn thing.

Maybe I'm just wired differently. I can easily see someone who is very pragmatic saying, "Yes, but there are methods and whatnot in this or that field that you'll need," and okay, sure, I see that. I would for instance tell everyone all day that they should make econometrics a secondary field, because in reality, econometrics is a hard subject to teach yourself. YOu need the stress and pressure of tests and problem sets, otherwise no one in their right mind will derive the estimator of some maximum likelihood procedure, or work out the asymptotic properties of this or that. And you do need that in today's world, because 9 times out of 10, you'll be an applied person. Still, I think your goal with school is to learn things - have your eyes opened, and your mind expanded. And I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that had I taken the money sequence with this guy, I'd be a better person for it.

I think you can still do these things as an assistant professor - follow all these things, in fact, but in different ways. Choosing co-authors is much like choosing a chairman. It may not at all be about choosing someone who is James Heckman, Nobel Laureate and master econometrician. It may be to choose, again, the guy or girl with whom you can talk about economics, or movies, or whatever. Someone who doesn't so intimidate you, for instance, that you can't learn or do anything on the project.